As the years went by, the number of athletes I coached and the variety of training programs I offered reached an important dimension.
Sports training is based on processes of continuous adaptation and development of new potential. That is why it is necessary to consider the athlete as an ever-evolving system, and the work and training of the coach should not stop even after so many years of experience or after achieving results with their athletes.
One of the most important lessons I have learned over the years of working together with so many athletes is that there is no such thing as perfect, good training for all circumstances.
At the beginning of my career I was convinced that the main quality of a coach was to prepare accurate and personalized training plans.
With experience and comparison, I have realized that that is only one part, however important, of the work. Have you ever wondered why sometimes an athlete in competition-even when prepared in the best way-doesn’t achieve the result he or she hoped for and, more importantly, which is even more difficult to understand, fails to perform as well as he or she should?
Why can this happen? Has this ever happened to you?
Have you always been able to understand the true motivations for each of your achievements, whether positive or negative?
We have already addressed several times topics related to motivation, performance anxiety and many of the psychological aspects close to the world of sports and beyond.
The mind decides
What I am interested in addressing is the influence on your sports results of the mental approach with which you approach your daily life and thus also training and competition.
This can make more of a difference than many workouts that are part of your schedule.
The first step is to start with thegoal.
Choosing the most important competitive goal is the best starting point for the season. The goal must be ambitious enough to stimulate you but still within your grasp to help you maintain high motivation and focus as the goal approaches. Setting a goal is indispensable even if you have just started exercising after years of being sedentary.
The level of the goal (the height of the bar) must be aligned with your potential, and it is essential that it clearly expresses a definite goal to be achieved. Like any trip, it requires planning and organization. As soon as you start doing this you are already at a higher level than the average person.
Carrying a goal also means taking responsibility. This is the second step. Responsibility especially to ourselves and the commitment we have made. At the end of the season you will have to take stock of your efforts and achievements, and this, in addition to the results achieved, will be the thermometer of the goodness of your sports season.
Train yourself to set up your attitude so that you can give 100 percent of yourself, and you will see that the results will repay your effort. Today the responsibility for a goal can also be public. Living in an increasingly social and interconnected world, you are exposed to the judgment of other athletes and other people who see and evaluate what you do on a daily basis.
Take the positive effects of this aspect. Knowledge by others of your goals and your path should serve to increase your level of “commitment” to the goal.
You need to focus on that and not on the thought that others may judge your training and performance every time. Learn to focus your attention on what you do and what you want to do. Those who devote too much time to seeing and evaluating what others are doing will eventually lose focus on their more important personal goals, assuming they have them. Devote your energy to daily commitment and personal growth without wasting time looking at what others are doing and why.
The third element on which the mental approach makes a difference is managing the negative outcome. Failure is a part of our everyday life especially for those who like to confront the world of sports competition. You will not always achieve your goals or expected results in competition or training. This should not alter your motivation. Mistakes and failures represent important moments of growth. You got it right. There are rare occasions when we can learn something. Failure is precisely one of them. If you have a negative approach all you will do is look for a series of excuses and culprits outside of yourself. There are and can be negative external human and environmental factors, it is true. But if you have a positive approach you have to take responsibility for what happened by trying to understand what happened and why. The purpose is to prevent a negative result from occurring again. This also affects my work. If after training you for months the results are not in line with expectations, I am the first to try to figure out not whose fault it is but what my contribution can be to make sure that this does not happen again. Look ahead. Think of new ideas and new solutions to deal with the rest of the season. Devoting time to distributing blame is a sport I have never been fond of. It pulls you away from long-term goals and helps you create personal alibis and justifications that are nothing but obstacles in your path.
Another important piece of your approach to sports activity concerns personal relationships. You must never forget that every sporting achievement at the amateur or professional level is always a result of a team of people who helped to achieve it. Even if you are an amateur and do not have a team serving you, you still have people around you who support you on a daily basis. The myopic, losing approach leads you to take all the credit for successes and as we have seen to dump the causes of any failures on others. The approach that will guarantee your success in the long run is that of sharing. You need to be grateful to those who follow your workouts on a daily basis, to your friends and teammates who share the effort and commitment of daily training with you, and to your family who support you and sometimes put up with all your sporting endeavors to which you often end up devoting so much time. Only in this way can you create a positive and collaborative environment around you that will continue to enthusiastically accompany you toward new and increasingly ambitious goals.
(Photo by bruce mars on Unsplash)